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Monday, 7 March 2011

Catch Me If You Can Blogfest

I haven't done many blogfests recently, but since this one doesn't require anything new, it's quite an easy one to get involved with. Here's the start of my WIP.

Brian Northington was in the local library. Given that he was a sixteen-year-old boy, that is a fact that might take some explaining. After all, it was an age at which the young men of Nether Wrexford generally engaged in the more traditional pursuits of hanging around on street corners, trying to acquire alcohol to which they were not entitled, and utterly failing to attract the attentions of the sixth formers from St Mary’s School for Girls down the road.

They did not spend their time in libraries. Or if they did, they at least pretended that they had gotten lost on their way to a party somewhere. Brian, however, clearly hadn’t heard about this, because he was currently ambling his way through the place’s shelves, his jeans and hooded top attracting some muted glares of mistrust until the library staff recognised his dark tangle of hair and slightly gangly good looks as familiar.

He had become a regular in the Nether Wrexford library for two reasons. The first was that it got him out of a house where shouting at him seemed to be the preferred method of communication, and where his elder sister Claire was currently crowing about her A-level results to truly unbearable levels. That they would be enough to get her into Oxford to study law was admirable enough in its way, Brian felt, but not really a reason to remind him of the fact every five minutes. Brian’s parents occasionally accused him of not thinking enough about what he wanted to do with his life, but if the alternative was Claire, with a complete life plan that almost certainly ended in world domination, Brian felt he was better off as he was.

The second, and rather more important, reason Brian was in the library came in the form of the noted early twentieth century reptile expert Sir Archibald Mathers. Or at least, in the form of the collection he had bequeathed to the place. Having Mathers’ actual form there would have posed something of a problem, given that it had last been sighted twenty years previously, inside a crocodile he had been studying on the banks of the Nile.

Great voice! I really enjoy texts where the third person narrator has a voice separate from the main character's voice, and you did this very well.

That said--I found the narrator's voice very negative--perhaps because of the narrator's negative view of young adult males that was the focus of the first two paragraphs. I didn't necessarily find this a bad thing, but I wasn't sure if it was the impression you intended for the reader to have.

I agree with Kristina. You have a strong voice, but Brian's character is hidden in all the language. He needs to show the reader who he is and what intrigues him. Share his thoughts with the reader.Great possibilities, and strong writing.

Court of Dreams

My comic fantasy take on faeries (or possibly fairies, depending on your taste in spelling) in which Thomas Greene learns that attracting the attention of the faerie courts is not always a good thing. Comes complete with a cast of forgetful fairy assassins, figments of the imagination, vengeful princesses, and not particularly nightmarish nightmare hunts. Click on the image for more info.

Searching and Witch Hunt

This image leads to details of my two urban fantasy novels. Please note that they contain far fewer jokes than my current stuff.